September Mourn

While June, July and August of 2005 will forever in my mind be remembered as one of the best summers I’ve ever had, I must confess, the ensuing September was one of the worst months I’ve ever had. Call it anticlimax if you will, but there’s more to it than that. Much more.

I’ve alluded to and even discussed to some extent my tenuous relationship with my parents. Well, I suppose the time has come to elaborate. And I suppose I’ll start with the terse clinical description that sums up so much of the dynamic: I’m the only child of two ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. If that doesn’t paint some sort of image, I don’t know what will.

I went to visit said parents during the last week of August – supposedly for a “vacation” from the vacation I’d been indulging in since late May…

If there’s a delicate way to put this, I can’t find it. So I’ll just come out with it. My mother has been sipping her way into a steady, sustained, self-destructive stupor since I came out to her way back during the barely post-Cro Magnon era of the Reagan administration (e.g.: 1987). Yeah, it’s been that long. Grudge much? If you ever feel the need to look up the term “false expectation,” then by all means, do. When you do, you’ll find pictures of both my mother and myself next to the definition. She’s the progenitor and I’m the result.

At first the situation was (pardon the pun) relatively easy to deal with. I’d taken care of that. I’d moved all the way from New England to California. I’d put distance between us. Not just physical distance, but cultural distance, too, as I knew my parents perceived California to be “the land of the fruits and the nuts.” Whenever I heard that experession (as I did, many thousands of times over Walter Cronkite’s delivery of the evening news, TV trays in place; TV dinners upon them), I had two – apparently opposing – reactions. On one hand, I immediately understood my parents’ undercutting reference; but on the other hand, deep inside me, a semi-latent fascination with all matters radical perked up and took notice… I suppose that’s largely how I came to equate California with my eventual freedom.

So, when the proper time came (yes, it had to be the “proper” time, as I was still very much New English on the outside), I annouced to my circle of college friends, shortly after graduation, that I was going to move to San Francisco. (Would now be the best time to mention that graduation came with a few thousand bucksaws from my parents, which, I’m sure, they’d envisioned my banking until I needed to buy an engagement ring or put down some money for a home? OK. Consider it mentioned. Yes, I understand how my parents might have come to view this as “insult to injury.”) Of course, the rote repsonse in parts New English back then – and probably still is – “Oh, you’ll be back.”

But I never came back. Even now, almost 20 years later, I still haven’t come back. While I might have returned, finally, to the east coast, I have in no way returned to New England. And despite my disinclination to ever say “never,” I’m pretty sure I can remain honorbaly inclined to say I’ll never go back there. NYC is as close as it gets, baby.

Instead of coming back, I came further out. My 10 years in San Francisco resulted in my evolving from an uptight Irish Catholic prick, albeit an already quite homosexual one, to a radical leftist queer sexworker. (Yes, “sexworker” – that’s what we whores are referred to in more civilized social circles.) And as my consciousness soared, that of my parents remained stagnant at best. Actually, I think it digressed, because I wasn’t there to be “in their face” enough to whittle away at their defenses.

It was easy enough to hide my true self from them whenever I mad my bi-annual trips “home.” After all, I’d been hiding myself from them all my life – and they’d come to expect that – so what difference did it make? But there was a difference. There grew between the three of us an undescribable, inescapable tension. It was as if we lived constantly with the impending threat of an Irish Catholic denial implosion. (No, of course it couldn’t have been an explosion. That would’ve been too explicit.)

By the time my decade in SF was coming to a close, I was coming into my own. I’d broken away from the bourgeois strings of 9-5. I was supporting myself as a sexwoker so that I could write, produce and star in my very own one-man shows. I worked one show to death, playing it at venue after venue until finally I landed a gig at “THE” venue and was written up in several of the Bay Area weeklies – and favorably, I might add. Soon after all this happened, I felt the chill of San Franciso’s glass ceiling, so I knew it was time to move on. It didn’t matter that the rest of the Bay Area had become a warm an nurturing womb. What mattered most was my progression, for better or worse.

So I progressed to Los Angeles, for several reasons, not the least of which was love. Yes, indeed, the cynical whore had found love, in the form of a visual artist from Salt Lake City who’d taken to homesteading in South Central – right around the time of the Rodney Kind riots. How cool is THAT? (Heh.) I rationalized the move in as many self-interested directions as possible, but whenever I got (amidst all the moving and shuffling and sanding and scraping and prepping and painting and repainting and touching up and re-touching) a moment to myself, I realized I’d moved to that god forsaken lot in Los Angeles for love, plain and simple. Hell, I had entered my 30s, so I figured that’s what it was time to do. Settle down and all…

Yeah, I was there to find an agent and maybe do some commercial work. Yeah, I was there to continue playwriting and launch gigs at venues in a bigger pond. And yeah, I did some of that. But most importantly, I was there because I’d found a soul mate.

When I told Mom and Dad about my newfound interest in domestic bliss, they were actually happy. Even if it couldn’t be a wife, I’d at least found a spouse. That’s how they saw the situation. So for a brief while they changed their icy New English tune to one of almost veritable support. In that area, at least. But as for the artsy-fartsy bohemianism? That they still couldn’t handle. See, I’m what most conservative parents might call a “double whammy.” Not only am I gay, but I’m also a bohemian. For real. This ain’t no adolescent phase (much like the queerness wasn’t, either). This is my life. This is moi. This is who and what I am. I’m the rare statistic that parents dread. I didn’t outgrow either phase.

Now, in the interest of ostensible fairness, let’s then hear some sympathy for my folks. All together now: “Awwwwwwww…”

See, the funniest thing about my folks (“funny,” as in deep-dark “weird,” that is – it’s nowhere near funny “ha-ha,” except in the deepest and darkest of ways) is this: They have never been able to think of my gayness as something that has happened to me; they can only perceive it in terms of how it has “happened” to them. For all the “It’s just not a lifestyle I would’ve chosen for you” and “If there was only something we could’ve done to prevent this from happening to you,” notions they might have sent my way, I’ve never once heard from either of them any statement remotely resembling, “Well, if that’s who and what you think you are, then I suppose I’ll have to support that.” Their most compassionate explanations and descriptions have been replete with prejudice and blame. And I don’t, at this point, think I need to spell out exactly against whom they are prejudiced and whom they blame.

So: in a nutshell… Ever since the fall of 1987, immediately after I’d packed everything I could fit into my 1981 VW Jetta and driven across the country to move to SF, my mother has been depressed. She has been so depressed that she developed not only one, not even two, but three types of cancer – each related to her sex and maternity: breast, cervial, and uterine, respectively. And a few years after she’d had several surgeries and “beaten the odds,” dear ol’ Dad came down with prostate cancer.

Now, I’m not one to victim-blame, but am I the only one who sees a weird sort of subconscious, repressed Irish Catholic poetic justice in this picture? Which is not to say, in using the term “poetic justice,” that I think it’s just that my parents have fallen prey to these diseases, but I do – especially as a writer – see a literary pattern of sorts.

Flash forward to the August just passed, the final week during which I visited my parents on “vacation.” Not only did I once again have to face the living image that has become my alcohol-soaked, post-chemo’d Mom – who’s taken to sleeping until 4pm so that she might stay up until 5am sipping white wine from a box and watching Nick at Nite – but I also had to listen to Dear Ol’ Dad’s justifications as to exactly why I was honor-bound to nod and smile whenever she dished out one of her insults (a/k/a, in their heads, “truisms”). In their heads, there’s nothing wrong with our relationship. As it turns out, even though homosexuality never factored into their personal equations, they both hated their mothers. For them, hating one’s mother is status quo. I think that’s the thing they ultimately believe is most radical about me – that I refuse to accept continued abuse from my mother.

But that doesn’t stop her from dishing it out. And it doesn’t stop him from supporting her in doing so. That’s what I learned, during a one-week stay last August back at the homefront. After all these years and after falling under the false assumption that moving “back east” would bring me closer to the parents I’d abandoned almost 20 years ago, I finally came to the realization that I wasn't the only one responsible for our alienated dynamic. In fact, my parents were not only equally to blame for setting up the dynamic, they are apparently quite content with keeping it intact. So when I returned to Brooklyn, after a somewhat longer than brief escape to Party-Party/Never-Never Land, I eventually came (down) to the point of recognizing all this.

Mom hasn’t recovered and most likely never will recover from realizing that I am gay. And her response to the matter has been to take what we Irish like to call “the low road” – denial, anger, and blame. Dad plays the part of the codependent in this case, silently supporting Mom’s behaviors through not making any attempts to change them. Why? Because ultimately he agrees with her position, so he can’t muster up the strength to argue with it.

I am a faggot in my parents’ eyes. As ‘50s generation staunch blue-collar-made-white-collar Irish Catholics from Massachusetts, that’s the only perception available to them. To question that perception would open them up to questioning every other perception that contributes to their sensibility. Like the Roman Catholic church, they espouse to love the sinner but hate the sin.

And that’s a sin I can’t even begin to love any sinner for.

Therein lies the conflict between me and my parents. That’s the reason why I fall into 30-day depressions after each visit I make to Massachusetts. I do my best to recognize that their reaction is not my responsibility; that how they feel about who and what I am ultimately has nothing to do with the essence of who and what I am. But it hurts to visit them. It hurts to see the devastation that the unwillingness to reconsider a sensibility will do to a body (or two, or three, or more – all the way up to a society). THAT’s what pushes me into a chasm of depression. That’s why September was such an awful month for me. And that’s the demon I need to battle next.

“Next!”